Thursday, July 08, 2010

Please Touch Museum

Philadelphia's Please Touch Museum is a children's museum with the most clever of names.

Please Touch is located in the beautiful, palatial, and historic Memorial Hall in Philadelphia.

It scores lots of points with this dad amongst children's museums for having lots of benches for tired parents to sit on.

Please Touch makes use of corporate sponsorships in a way I haven't seen at other Children's museums, and that I'm not so sure I am comfortable with. I'm accustomed to the signs that recognize the benefactor of an exhibit. Please Touch works sponsor's brands into the exhibits. The grocery store is a Shop Rite, the gas station a Hess, and there is a mock-up McDonald's. I found no other signage at any of these exhibits aknowledging the company that's logo appeared on the exhibit.

In addition to the exhibts just mentioned, some of the other highlights were a SEPTA bus, a mock-up of a monorail, a water play area, and an Alice in Wonderland themed maze and play area.

Less interesting for the little kids than for the adults, is the exhibit on the 1876 Centennial Exhibition explains the history of the building housing the museum and the surrounding buildings and park land. There is large scale model of the sprawling Centennial Exhibition grounds.

The final notable feature of the Please Touch Museum is century old Dentzel Carrousel in an adjoining pavillion. The boy declined the opportunity to ride the carrousel. I've never known the boy to miss the chance to decline a ride on a carrousel.
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About Me

Seth Chase has been leading grassroots activists and winning advocacy campaigns for over 10 years. His expertise includes campaign planning, advocate recruitment, training and organizing lobby days. He is accomplished at executing multiple nationwide campaigns, managing field staff, working with volunteer leadership, building coalitions and appealing to voters. He is currently managing a muti-state campaign to improve the quality and access of proven home visiting services for at-risk families of very young children at the Pew Charitable Trusts.

Chase started his career in Washington, D.C. with the League of Women Voters Education Fund during the 2000 election cycle, handling campaign outreach for a nationwide Internet-based voter guide. For the 2002 election cycle, he represented the League of Women Voters on the Youth Vote Coalition Board of Directors and supervised two voter turnout field sites. He also organized the Emerging Issues in Election Reform conference.

Chase served as field director for the American Association of University Women (AAUW), where he worked from 2004 to 2012. At AAUW, he planned and managed grassroots advocacy, voter education and grassroots leadership development. His advocacy campaigns succeeded in passing the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act; the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act; theHigher Education Opportunity Act; the College Cost Reduction and Access Act; the America COMPETES Act; and the Perkins Vocational and Technical Education Act.

He joined SevenTwenty Strategies as vice president for strategic services in July 2012 where developed and delivered advocacy strategies to meet clients' policy objectives before moving to Pew Charitable Trusts in November 2013.

Chase is a husband and father. He makes his home in Alexandria, Virginia and enjoys cooking, brewing beer, travel, hiking, camping, volunteering on political campaigns, reading and exercise.